


Do the Hard Thing

by venueska



Category: Love Island (Video Game)
Genre: Bisexual Female Character, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/F, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Love Triangles, Multi, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-23
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:07:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26046244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venueska/pseuds/venueska
Summary: The fairytale love has realized itself on a trip following a tragedy. Maia flies out to her estranged grandmother’s estate following her death, entitled to all of her possessions as her only living successor. Hustling side-by-side with her late grandmother’s caretaker and only friend Blake, overwhelmed by the sudden responsibility to throw together a wake for a relative she didn’t even love, Maia will find herself broken down in front of a baker boy named Bobby in the eye of a twofold hurricane; suddenly it makes sense what they say about braving the rain to see the rainbow. Emotions run high and mistakes are made, but feelings take root and push themselves above all reason and reality. The distance between Liverpool and Colorado is an afterthought, until it’s upon them. Sometimes you have to do the hard thing to get the real thing.
Relationships: Blake/Original Character(s), Bobby McKenzie/Original Character(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 17





	Do the Hard Thing

**Author's Note:**

> soo this is something new! if you take a quick peek at my profile i typically strictly write one-shots for bobby. i've never seen blake/mc written and i've been trying to think of a way i could write it and keep myself engaged so, (slight spoiler but... not really) love triangle it is. enjoy!

The call came late on Thursday night. Maia’s hair was pulled up on top of her head in a loose bun, her torso wrapped in a gray tee with mustard stained on the left breast and her legs bare in the Colorado air, breezing through the open screen door, foretelling the upcoming autumn. She can remember the smell of the wind; it had just rained. The feel of the steel spoon on her tongue, the color of the ice cream she stared at as she listened to someone she had never met deliver the news: “You probably already know this, but your grandmother Eve was really sick for a long time.” And no, she didn’t, because she hadn’t seen the woman in twelve years. But she doesn’t shoot the messenger. She waits for the inevitable next bit without another breath, frozen in place, holding the spoon between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. “Your dad was her only son. You’re her only successor.” When Maia says nothing back right away, the girl continues, “Everything she owned is yours now.”

Maia lets the moment of silence afterwards drip with tension. Finally she breaks it, pulling the spoon out of her mouth and shoving it into the ice cream again. “So she’s dead?”

“Yes.” The poor British girl on the other end of the call is stunned by the blunt question. Maia might care if she wasn’t so utterly amused by the news, which she knows is a little insane, but she can’t help it. Eve was a witch of a woman. Her death was the exact kind of good news Maia needed to make it through the week. “She left you in charge of her bookstore. The Obie estate, the - “

“Well, I don’t want it,” Maia shoots back.

“Excuse me?”

Maia ignores the question. “Who am I speaking to?”

“This is Blake,” the girl responds. “Blake Carlisle. I was your grandmother’s caretaker.”

“Thank you for your years of service,” Maia says curtly, sliding the ice cream carton over the counter. “Take the estate. Take the inheritance. Take it all, it’s yours. I don’t want anything to do with Evelyn Obie, dead or alive. Thanks for your time.”

Maia’s thumb hovers over the bright red  _ End Call _ button, but Blake says to wait. Impatiently, Maia lifts the phone back up to her ear, “Make it quick,” she says. 

There’s no real reason to hurry up the call. Maia’s day isn’t packed at all. The summer drizzle outside her screen door was a simple but effective dealbreaker for whatever beach day she might have had today. But to Maia, any minute spent worrying about grandma Eve is a moment wasted - she knows Eve wouldn’t have done the same for her. If the roles were reversed, Eve never would have received a call. And if she had, she would have popped the champagne by now. 

“You heard me correctly, didn’t you?” Blake’s accent is somehow thicker now that Maia is irritated. “Your grandmother passed away this evening.”

“I heard you loud and clear,” Maia says back. “I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

Blake sighs. There’s a pause, and Maia can envision Blake rubbing her temples between her fingers. “I don’t want to pry - “ Blake starts to say.

“Good,” Maia snaps, “Then don’t.”

“What did Eve do to you?” Blake asks anyway. Maia scoffs, amused that Blake thinks playing mail carrier entitles her to knowing any backstory.

“Nice try.” Maia rolls her eyes. “Have a good day, Blake.”

“ _ Please _ ,” Blake cuts in again, just as Maia’s ready to hang up for the second time. “I’ll admit that I don’t know the first thing about you. I don’t know what happened between you and Eve, so it’s mad of me to ask you for any favors.”

Maia smiles tight up against her teeth, her voice dripping in sarcasm. “So why do I feel one coming on anyway?”

Blake brushes off the intensity with ease. Maia almost hates how understanding Blake is of her frustration. It’s hard to hate her, because she’s so patient. So reserved and charismatic. It was sickening. “If you don’t fly out to Liverpool, I have to plan her wake on my own,” she says.

“So?” Maia says, arching her brow although Blake can’t see it.

“So I’m asking you to have a little humanity,” Blake replies, and her voice doesn’t quiver. The subtle sternness in her voice shakes Maia. She truly has no interest in seeing her grandmother’s home or the bookstore, or a lick of whatever wealth the old hag had left behind. Blake was her caretaker before she passed, but otherwise a complete stranger. It just didn’t seem fair to take out her frustrations on Blake and pass the buck on her responsibilities, whether she wanted to honor them or not.

Finally, Maia steams a defeated sigh, and lets the awkward moment stew a little longer before she finally speaks again. “Alright. You win.”

“You’ll come?” Blake says, and Maia is surprised by how excited she sounds. “Great. I mean, cool. I’ll arrange your flight, your hotel if you’d like one. Do you need the address?”

Maia pauses, glancing toward her bedroom down the hall, mentally steering herself into the top shelf of her wardrobe where all of the returned letters she had tried to send to Eve were packed away, rotting away in spilled Moscato and river water from the night Maia tried to gather enough liquid courage to get rid of them. Instead she chased after the box in her nightdress and the cold autumn air to retrieve them. She shut her eyes at the memory. 

“No need. I know the address by heart.”

Blake says a quaint, “Okay,” then signs off the phone call with charm, and something bucks in Maia’s chest when she recounts the conversation.

The clock reads barely afternoon, but every bone in Maia’s body screams time for bed. She slides her crossed arms down the counter in front of her and presses her forehead to the cold marble. The next few months would be nowhere close to as quiet as this moment, so she takes a moment to soak it in. It’s ruined by the replaying of Blake’s voice, rising with excitement when she says, “You’ll come?” in an English accent that Maia’s rusty memory can’t quite place. 

Whoever Blake Carlisle was, she had a way of getting stuck in Maia’s head with less than twenty minutes spent, which made her the blurriest line Maia had ever tried to read. She was good at whatever last scam she was pulling for Eve. At the very least, it had better be fun.

* * *

  
  


_ Bobby, your time on Love Island has come to an end. You have thirty minutes to gather your things and meet the remaining Islanders outside the Villa. _

The look on Bobby’s face isn’t easy to read. All eyes are on him, watching him carefully to see what clever joke he’s got ready for this very moment. But he doesn’t crack one; instead, he stares wordlessly at the step to the fire pit. After some time, he looks back up with his crooked smile plastered back on and meets eyes with Noah, then Hope, then Elijah, then Quinn, who looks to the left of sorry. He trembles just slightly before he spreads his arms wide, hoping his eyes don’t tell too much.

“Well, there you have it.” Bobby grins. “The clock’s struck midnight, lads! What a ball, your highness,” he says with a bow, taking Hope’s hand and pressing a lighthearted kiss to her knuckles. Hope chuckles, scanning over his face just like she had in the kitchen before she made Quinn aware that Bobby still had feelings for her. 

“What’s next for you then, Cake Man?” Noah asks once they’re outside the villa, leaning in to give Bobby a goodbye hug.

“Yeah, mate. I’m getting emotional thinking about you, watching us on your little screen, curled up on the couch like a cat,” Elijah says, cracking a smile. Bobby bursts out laughing.

“Are you kidding? After the excitement here I’ll never be able to sit still again.” He glances at Quinn, whose freckled arms are folded over her chest. Her eyes are trained on the ground, but he knows she’s not watching the gravel. She’s just like him, reliving the conversation on the roof from mere days before the final recoupling. The minutes that felt like hours after he said he loved her, before she admitted she only saw him as a golden ticket to fifty grand.

It’s then that he meets eyes with poor, enamored Elijah. He doesn’t know a thing, and maybe that’s Bobby’s fault. But he couldn’t bring himself to admit that he only knew because he made a fool out of himself on live television. Besides, she would get her karma eventually, right? There was no way the viewers would vote for her after the footage aired. 

Either way, the problem wasn’t his. Quinn’s future was no longer entwined with his own, so whether her dreams came true or not, life would go on. He would have to go back to his job at the hospital, to his dreary apartment in gloomy Glasgow, and pretend her smile wouldn’t have lit up the city. Because whether he missed her or not, whether he checked her Instagram every morning or not, their lives were separate, untouched, as if they had never met. Something about staying in denial about meeting her was slightly more comforting than admitting she was a bad person, because if she was and even now that he  _ knew _ that, he still loved her, what does that say about him?

Every thought Bobby had did a set of laps in his mind in the seconds before he finally spoke to her, and what he said didn’t sum up the half of it. He could have spit fire, he could have been earnest with her. But instead he said, “Goodbye.”

She stares at him, her ginger hair cascading down her shoulders in perfect waves, her eyes shining in the streetlights and costly flashlights from the camera crew. They’re the same warm, brown eyes he used to wake up to with a contagious smile on his face, but they’re giving him the coldest stare he’s ever received.

But the moment is short, even if the effects of it live much longer. So Bobby bids the rest of the crew farewell, says a final, lighthearted goodbye in the beach hut, and catches the loneliest jeep ride in the world to spend the night in a hotel with crystal chandeliers and expensive champagne, but the glamor doesn’t make his insides feel any less pathetic than they do. He knows it’s temporary. Soon he’ll be back home, in the apartment he thought he might someday share with Quinn, but he would be alone. And even though she had never set foot in it, her memory would linger there for a long, long time.

It’s then that Bobby decides it’s time for him to start his life over.

* * *

“Jonno, I quit,” Bobby says, swinging the keys to his locker around his pointer finger as he walks into the kitchen, dressed as if he’s just walked out of a Vegas casino. The unbuttoned sunset printed Hawaiian shirt down to the khaki shorts far too short for a rainy day in Glasgow, he looked like he was dressed for anywhere but here. 

Big Jonno’s thick eyebrows shoot up, and he reaches up to take his hat off and scratch his head. Jonno had the sort of face that reacted all at once. Every muscle moved to frown, full of hurt and confusion. “You quit?” Bobby hums back an affirmation. “Why’s that?”

“C’mon, Jonno,” Bobby says, pulling the sunglasses off the top of his head. “I’ve been working here since my friends all started uni. It’s been fun but I need to get out of this town.”

“You know I’ll always support you, Bobby,” Big Jonno says gently, and Bobby tenses as he waits for the  _ but _ . “But I think you’re making a mistake.”

“You do? Why?” Bobby doesn’t mean to sound so defensive, but he knows why and he wants Jonno to say it with his chest. He knows Jonno watched him get his heart shattered on national television, and he knows that walking in the day after his elimination to quit his job of seven years probably looks like breakup grief, but Bobby knows it isn’t. 

“Bobby,” Big Jonno says, giving Bobby a look pleading him not to pick a fight right now.

“No, say it. C’mon, it’s me, Jonno.” Bobby puffs out his chest, a grin on his face, but something about his tone is unfamiliarly cold; something he recognizes as a trait he caught from Quinn, but he’s not bothered about healing right now. He needs to leave. It’s the one thing he’s sure of. “You’re not usually this shy, mate. I should know. I know I learned not to be spineless from the best. Don’t talk up a broll before you can say knife and turn dafty last minute.”

Big Jonno stiffens at Bobby’s sudden belligerence but he doesn’t give in. He takes off his hat and tosses the rest of the crew a look, cuing them to do the same. “We’ll miss you, Mickey,” he says, his eyes twinkling as he cracks one last inside joke before Bobby walks out of the kitchen for the last time, but without a proper goodbye. He does so wordlessly. It’s out of character for him, and ironically the most memorable thing he’s ever done to them.

He can’t be bothered to care how they remember him. Only how he forgets them now.

  
  


* * *

Blake’s feathers are freshly ruffled. Her glowing, amber eyes are a dark brown now. Her glamorous, flowing brown hair is greasy and pulled back into a low bun in the crook of her neck, and thanks to the stress of the last twelve weeks, her skin is starting to resemble that of the late elederly woman she cared for. 

Eve had lost her battle to her own body just last night, and although it was next to impossible, Blake’s grief for her had taken the form of guilt. Because for the solid nine days she spent away from Eve’s bedside, her placeholder caretaker must have stumbled somewhere in the routine. And she couldn’t be angry at the placeholder, because she was only doing what she could for what she was being paid. It wasn’t her job. It was Blake’s, and she had put her very slim chances at finding love before it - no, before Eve. And she could hardly forgive herself for trusting that it would all work out. Because, looking around, it hadn’t. She was so much worse off than she had been before.

No lover. No Eve. No job. No fifty grand. She was hopelessly and utterly alone. Again.

She flipped through Eve’s numerous phone and address books, searching fruitlessly for any mention of the granddaughter Eve had mentioned - Maia was her name. Eve had mentioned Maia every day before she died. She had described the girl as she had last seen her in vivid detail - Blake could almost form the girl in front of her just from Eve’s storytelling.

Eve had declined to explain why Maia could not be here. Even once it became clear that Eve would soon die, she refused to call. With scraps for context, Blake was beyond confused - she was almost angry that Maia would not take it upon her to call on her own. 

“She’s your only living family,” Blake said gently, careful not to raise her voice despite how strongly she wanted to protest on Eve’s behalf. “You should call her. You deserve a proper goodbye.”

Eve was so delicate when the conversation took place. Her skin was like cracked porcelain; shattered and pieced back together. Her voice was raspy, barely above a whisper. But the room was quiet. Not even the hum of a nearby lamp was audible as the room was entirely lit by candlelight, per Eve’s request.

Eve shook her head and said, tonelessly, for she was so frail she could no longer use one: “Some sins cannot be forgiven.”

Blake only frowned, not asking outwardly for an explanation. It was as typically unrevealing and damning as she would have expected anyone to speak on their deathbed. But she wanted to know, even if her curiosity most likely overstepped on many levels for both Eve and this Maia whom she hadn’t met.

Now that Eve was gone, she had no choice but to cross that line. Maybe Maia had stayed away from Eve all these years for a good reason and would want nothing to do with the Obie estate and all of its companion riches. Just the thought of Maia turning it down made Blake roll her eyes all the way back into her head. Just how bad could the rift between Maia and Eve had been that Maia would throw away her entire inheritance? No matter how estranged they were, somewhere in Maia, there had to be a part of her that longed for a memento or just a fraction of her birthright.

Eve’s phone books were loaded with contacts of all the highest esteemed folks in and out of Liverpool, some of which Blake wasn’t even sure were still living, considering the age of the brittle pages. But each and every one of the numbers under Maia’s name were corrected several times, with variations of  _ Moved to SEE PAGE 9 _ scrawled out beside them. It seemed that whenever Eve found a way to contact her granddaughter, her granddaughter made it her mission to make sure she never could. It was so sad on Eve’s behalf, because there were well over thirty numbers assigned to Maia Obie in this single phone book. Just how badly did Maia want Eve kept away? It seemed so cruel. Blake could feel her curiosity for this girl’s story deepening, and it only made her search the books more furiously.

Finally, Blake had followed the breadcrumbs Eve had left for herself to the last known number for Maia Obie, which had no scrawlings beside it. Blake guessed that Eve had stopped there, never calling, because she had finally gotten the hint, but still wanted the number available.

Hoping for the best, Blake dialed the number into her personal smartphone, and waited for Maia to pick up.

“Hello,” she says once she hears the click. “You probably already know this, but your grandmother Eve was really sick for a long time.”

**Author's Note:**

> a major theme in this fic is going to be the estrangement between eve and maia. the reason why is revealed along the way, but if religious trauma or internalized homophobia is a trigger for you i encourage you to stop reading for your own safety. it's a major theme, even if not the core plot.
> 
> also- Quinn is in-game MC. she comes back later but Maia won't behave the same way as in-game MC because she's not her. the story i want to tell is about Maia, not Quinn. i also wanted to see more bisexual representation, and i hope this inspires more of that! thanks for reading! :) 
> 
> kudos and comments are appreciated, i'd like to know how many people are interested in seeing me carry this on lol!


End file.
